“. . . I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. while wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, & unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?”
Here, in his letter of July 5, 1814, to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson states unequivocally what he thought of the Athenian’s magnum opus. In an age in which Aristotelian empiricism, as embodied in the philosophical and political treatises of John Locke, dominated, is it any wonder that Plato’s utopian concept of a state ruled by elite philosopher-kings failed to resonate among statesmen such as Jefferson and many of his fellow founding brothers? Yet it would be foolish to assume that Plato, and specifically his Republic, had no influence on those at the forefront of creating the modern Western world. In this essay I will briefly survey how political thinkers in America and Europe responded to and, most importantly, implemented Platonic ideas in the establishment of republican forms of government.
Related by birth to two of the Sparta-sympathizing Thirty Tyrants and a student of Socrates, who was executed because of his close relationship with leading pro-aristocratic politicians, Plato had no love for Athenian democracy. This antidemocratic bias is clearly exhibited in Republic, a work that was well-known to any eighteenth-century educated person. Attempting to define justice and its role in bringing happiness to humankind, Plato’s spokesman Socrates, along with interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus, endeavors to construct from scratch the ideal state in which justice will reign. The result is a stunningly hierarchical system with a highly educated elite serving as the state’s leaders. Indeed, an elaborate education system is outlined in which the censorship of works deemed antithetical to the mission of the state would be practiced. In order to eliminate self-interest and to inculcate a spirit of service to the state, Plato further devises a purely communist order in which all property, including women and children, are to be held in common. Moreover, eugenics would be practiced: Only the best would be allowed to mate in order to ensure the creation of more perfect offspring. The deformed and useless would be confined to dark places while forced abortion and infanticide would be tools used by the state to attain its desired end, a citizenry devoted to the state and a group of philosopher-kings whose wisdom would allow the state to prosper in peace and stability.
The Platonic vision of government articulated in the Republic was certainly antithetical to the Lockean model embraced by the Founders in America. According to Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, the state was created to ensure the protection of private property. Individual freedom and the right to pursue one’s personal interests, expressed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, took precedence over any notion of a General Will that was to be interpreted by a group of elites. The American Revolution was fought, one could argue, to make sure that a Platonic state would never gain entry on a continent to which freedom-loving men had looked as the last bastion of independent living.
Nevertheless, there were areas of thought where Plato, Jefferson, Adams, and other Founders certainly agreed. The most obvious point of agreement was the role of education in stabilizing government. The Athenian philosopher went into great detail outlining the type of education his Guardians would receive, with dialectic being the final, and most important, step in developing the type of ruler who would set aside self-interest and wisely lead a people devoted to the state. Remarkably forward-looking, Plato expected females to have the same educational, and military, training as the males. Without a comprehensive education, no ruler would be in a position to provide the type of insightful leadership required to ensure stability and order in the state.
In viewing education as the foundation of a republican government, both Jefferson and Adams were more expansive than Plato in their vision. Believing that only an informed citizenry could maintain the new republic, the Virginian offered a radical proposal for his state. In his 1779 “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson proposed a system of tax-funded public education that would allow “all the free children, male and female” to attend classes for three years. These children could then continue their education beyond three years if a family member could pay tuition fees while only the most outstanding could matriculate to William & Mary College. It might be added here that, in the Jefferson-influenced 1785 and 1787 ordinances that specified how the territory in the northwest should be governed, public education was viewed as playing the central part. Jefferson’s lifelong commitment to education culminated in his 1817 proposal to establish a secular university in Charlottesville, close to his Monticello home.
Adams, who shared Jefferson’s public distaste for Platonic political theory, also viewed the education of citizens as paramount for the preservation of republicanism. In the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, perhaps his greatest achievement, Adams placed public education at the very center of its understanding of government responsibility, devoting an entire section to the need to support public education. Here Adams stresses that “. . . it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the . . . public schools.” Both male and female were to receive a free basic education in public schools that, by law, would be established in all towns within the Commonwealth. Similar to Jefferson, Adams anticipated only the most talented continuing their education past grammar school.
Education was not the only area where members of the Founding Generation saw in Plato a kindred spirit. Indeed, the insistence on establishing a government headed by an educated class of elites was not confined to Plato’s utopia. Despite their arguments that republicanism provided opportunities for advancement to all motivated individuals, the vast majority of the Founders assumed that only a natural aristocracy made up of the educated and “better folk” could adequately steer the ship of state and provide the leadership required to realize the Lockean goal of government. Adams was very consistent throughout his political career in arguing for an American republican government that followed the British model, in which a legislative body of elites would balance a chamber representing the people. In his early letters on government as well as in his influential Thoughts on Government of 1776, Adams maintained the need for a bicameral assembly that would ensure that the self-interests of the middling class would be checked by a natural aristocracy intent on pursuing what was best for the entire polity. In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1786- 87), Adams so strongly presents the case for a class of elites to control government that he was caricatured for the rest of his life by Jeffersonians as a closet aristocrat, in favor of an oligarchy and not a republic. (It is instructive to note that, in Book I of Defence, Adams cited Plato in his list of political theorists past and present who supported his concept of a republic.)
And in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as well as in the early years of the fledgling nation, there persisted a sense that giving too much political power to middling men was a recipe for disaster. Alexander Hamilton’s infamous speech at the Convention in favor of the British constitution, the entire debate on the roles of the Executive and the Senate, and Hamilton’s later funding proposal of 1790 tying American aristoi to the new government made clear that the elitism favored by Plato was alive and well in eighteenth-century republican America.
Of course, in the spirit of Locke, the American Founders would have scorned Plato’s notion of a General Will that only the wisest of leaders could interpret and which must be followed regardless of individual sentiment to the contrary. After all, an individual’s pursuit of happiness was highlighted in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In the ideal republic, the give and take of public debate was a necessary process whenever the public good was confronted by individual liberty. One person, or a small group of the state’s “betters,” could not arbitrarily make decisions that affected the whole. This was, in fact, the rationale for a bicameral assembly that represented a variety of interests and classes. This was a hallmark of American government at both the state and the federal level.
Plato’s insistence on the necessity of an individual’s yielding his rights to the state and accepting the decisions of the Guardians in the best interests of the polity may not have garnered public support in America, but, given its much different political environment, Europe proved to be a more fertile ground for the Platonic tenet that the General Will of the state must be sought and acted upon. More specifically, it was the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau who saw in the Athenian’s political philosophy the key for establishing a republic that would provide the optimum possibility of human happiness. In his early treatises, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau railed against modern society and its role in human suffering by its introducing arbitrary conventions and distinctions. What was needed was a polity that encouraged men to strive for a common good, for it was in such an effort that class and economic divisions would cease to blur the common humanity shared by all.
Rousseau found such a polity in Plato’s Republic. Like Plato, Rousseau believed that the state can experience order, peace, and justice only when citizens accept their proper place in society. This means that individuals must be willing to give up their natural rights. In his The Social Contract Rousseau maintains that, by giving up these rights via a contract with their fellow citizens, men will actually gain their true liberty. No longer will citizens be governed by their individual passions and interests; rather, they will be led by an infallible General Will that upholds the interests of all the citizens, whether they know it or not. In this way, there will be no internecine fighting as peace and tranquility will reign. Like Plato, Rousseau had little confidence in the common man; thus, it would be up to the highly intellectual few relying exclusively on reason, which Rousseau embraced in his treatise on education (Emile, or On Education), to interpret for the masses what the General Will was.
Although he died some eleven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Rousseau’s (and Plato’s) influence was undeniable. As a testament to the respect given to Rousseau by the revolutionaries, his ashes were brought to the newly dedicated Pantheon in Paris in 1792. While several of the Revolution’s leaders extolled the thinking of Rousseau, it was Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, who utilized the concept of the General Will as a means of controlling the direction of the Revolution. In setting himself up as the ultimate interpreter of the General Will, Robespierre was able to ensure that his voice was the voice of the nation. In eliminating all those who, he believed, strayed from the General Will and initiating a bloody purge of so-called “enemies of the state,” Robespierre demonstrated the underlying flaw of the Platonic concept of having the elite decide for society what was in the citizens’ best interests. The peace and order that Plato and Rousseau had envisioned when constructing their utopia never materialized; instead, bloodshed and chaos ensued, resulting ultimately in the ascension of a military dictatorship that led all Europe into a catastrophic series of wars.
Plato’s legacy in Western Civilization is both significant and complex. On the one hand, his metaphysics, funneled through the teaching of Plotinus, had a marked influence on early Christian writers such as Augustine and continues to underlie much of Catholic and Protestant theology. On the other hand, his political theory, articulated in works such as Republic and Laws, has a more ambivalent history in Western society. The importance of education in the support of the state, a key Platonic element, has been emphatically echoed by statesmen since the eighteenth century. Of course, one can see a difference in emphasis between Plato’s thought and that of early American political thinkers. While Plato focused his attention on the education of the leaders, Americans such as Jefferson and Adams saw the need for all freeborn children to receive a basic education, understanding that only an educated citizenry could properly maintain a republic. However, Plato’s vision of a hierarchical system in which the educated few would wield unquestioned authority in determining what was best for the general welfare of the citizenry has produced devastating results, beginning with the destructive policies of Robespierre and his henchmen and culminating in the ill-fated socialist and fascist regimes of the twentieth century. Plato’s idealistic picture of the wise philosopher king whose rule would be marked by pure altruism failed to take into consideration human nature and its propensity toward power and self-interest. In this way, Aristotle’s empiricism, championed by Locke and many of his eighteenth-century followers, better responded to the political questions of the day with its emphasis on pragmatism and utilizing human ambition in service to the state. Indeed, the success of the American Revolution and the relative failure of the French Revolution can be traced to the former’s rejection of the notion of a Platonic General Will and the latter’s embracing of it.
Gregory Spindler is a retired educator currently interested in the ideological history of the early American Republic.
